Prolegomenon for an Investigation of(the) Flesh: Carnal Hinge of Ontology

Abstract

These three epigraphs suggest themes for the major divisions ofthis work (dialectics, the sensuous, and the poetic) and also function to foreground the ontological component within the broader tradition of existential phenomenology in the 20th century. Specifically I want to reflect upon the urgency of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical considerations of what he called carnal and brute ontology, new concepts which, it seems to me, warrant closer scrutiny and continue to provide deeper, more profound alternatives for contemporary critical philosophies. Merleau-Ponty’s attempt to reconfigure the exhausted philosophical formulation ofsubject-object-meaning was cut short by his untimely death, leaving unfinished his critical work, The Visible and the Invisible, which described anew an ethics borne upon key notions of divergence, reversibility, alterity and (the) flesh.